Does the Legendary Pirate card that's on the black ship stay with the ship after each round (if no-one defeats them or lands on an island with a black ship) or do you change the card each round?

The black ship keeps rotating through and remains the same until someone defeats it...which means it could stay the same for the whole game.

Enjoy!

Those are the rules, but I often play with variations around the legendary pirate theme and expanded set of legendary pirates. You will find additional legendary pirates described on this page at the DOW site (under fan contributions):

So I added I think 6 new pirates to the existing set. Instead of using blank cards I printed the cards on card stock and then put all cards, originals plus fan created ones, inside card sleeves (with opaque backs so you can't see the differences between original and new). I then draw randomly from that expanded set of cards.

One variation I like is to select a new pirate randomly from this expanded set each time a player moves to an island with a legendary pirate. This is more fun as I am more likely to fight pirates with this variation (with the standard pirates there are too many that are just unbeatable and you can spend an entire game just avoiding the one mean pirate you happened to draw at the beginning of the game). However, the downside to this variation, which I actually like, is you don't know which pirate you are fighting until its too late, but this seems more realistic (if that matters).

Another variant is to roll a die each turn for each legendary pirate after you have chosen your destination (rather than before - though you could do that as an alternative). Move the legendary to the island indicated by the die and have the legendary pirate battle the poor sod(s) that chose that island. This adds more legendary pirate interaction but makes the game more chance driven. However, it gets tiring playing 2 or 3 player games where everyone intentionally avoids the legendary pirates. This forces some interaction and more battles.

We also play were you roll a die for the legendary pirate after evryone has chosen their island, when the black ship arrives, if a player is there, then they roll a die and if it is odd, then you battle, if it is even, then you do not as if the legendary pirates ship landed on the other side of the island and you were not discovered while plundering.